Mobility in the Virtual Office: A Document-Centric Workflow Approach

1. Mobility in the Virtual Office: A Document-Centric Workflow Approach Ralf Carbon, Gregor Johann, Thorsten Keuler, Dirk Muthig, Matthias Naab, Stefan Zilch Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), Germany thorsten.keuler@iese.fraunhofer.de

2. Outline • Introduction & Motivation • Mobility Scenarios • Reference Architecture • Component and Connectors (P2P Style) • Module View of Nodes (Layered Style) • Virtual Workflow Engine • Document-centric Approach • Summary

3. Context • Global business implies mobile, interacting workers • Typical services today: phone, e-mail, document sharing, workflow support • These kinds of services depend on connectivity (centralized infrastructure) • Consequence: Dynamic, ad hoc workflow collaborations are not supported

4. Virtual Office of the Future (VOF) Definition A type of telecommute in which workers are equipped with the tools, technology and skills to perform their jobs from anywhere the person has to be – home, office or customer's location. [Wikipedia] • New forms of cooperative, distributed and ad-hoc organized workflow support • Office applications and devices actively adapt their services with respect to the user’s context • Users have secure access to all their documents anywhere and any time InfrastructureCharacteristics

5. … Considering Workflow Requirements • Definition and execution • Involve different roles and people • Task-based workflow execution • Passing of data, parameters, and documents • Domain-specifics: Document-centric tasks/workflows

6. Mobility Scenarios • Offline worfkflow processing • Location- /Connectivity-independence • Synchronization after offline processing • Workflow collaboration in local networks • Ad hoc networks can be used for temporarily collaborating with co-workers • Arbitrary devices for workflow processing • Device-independence for executing roles • Exchanging the device during workflow processing • „Follow-me“ principle • Ressource virtualization • Context-aware service selection & adaptation

7. Reference Architecture • Driven by the scenarios • Scenario 1-3: Offline working capabilities • Architectural Strategy: • Autonomous workflow engines on each computational node • Fully decentralized workflow infrastructure Peer-to-peer Style (Topology-snapshot)

8. Components & Connectors • Components: • Peers <-> Nodes • Independent computational devices (PC, PDA, etc.) • Connectors: • Workflow connectors • They logically connect two or more nodes in case the users of the nodes are collaborating

9. Module Structure: Layers • Typical layering in SoA • Separation of the software into UI/App, Workflow processing, Services, Communication and Data • Collaboration within the P2P network • Communication layer allows to discover other nodes as well as sending and receiving workflow information • The virtual workflow engine emerges by logically connecting all workflow-layers of collaborating nodes • Physically the communication is handled similar to the ISO/OSI principle

10. Virtual Workflow Engine • Transparent exchange of data with In- and Outboxes • High-level sequence of workflow executions: • Inbox – workflow step(s) execution – Outbox • Inbox as well as outbox are using the communcation mechanisms as provided by the communication layer (send/receive) • But, where are the workflows defined and stored?

11. Document-centric Workflows • VoF Documents („Virtual Office of the Future“) comprise • Regular documents (e.g. pdf, ppt, …) • Definition of the workflow producing/manipulating regular documents • Representation of the current instance of a workflow, including the current status and the history • Meta-information such as comments attached to documents or tasks Example: „Publication workflow“

12. Distributed Workflow Execution Sender node • Collaborating workflows are realized by exchanging VoF documents • A VoF document is sent by using the outbox of that particular node (The outbox uses the communication layer to physically send the document) • The receiver node gets the VoF documents from the communication layer by having it put into ist inbox • The user opens VoF documents in the inbox by using office applications of the UI layer The Workflow execution extracts all required information for visualization (e.g. current status, upcoming tasks, etc.) 4. After finishing all required tasks, the VoF document is put into the outbox, so it can be routed to the next peer in the workflow 1 3 4 2 Receiver node

13. … Summary • P2P Style-based Architecture for Document-centric, Distributed, Context-aware Workflow Support • Prototypical Implementation of • Communication Infrastructure based on the JXTA framework • Support for Publishing, Discovering (Peer-Id matches UserId), Messaging, and Caching • VoF Document • Consists of XML files containing the workflow definition, the current instance and the documents associated with the current workflow state • UI • is integrated into MS Outlook to provide a look and feel familiar to most users, however, our solution in general is technology independent • Support for the Fraunhofer IESE publication process

14. Thank you for your attention! … Questions?